EU-level agencies: new executive centre formation or vehicles for national control?

Abstract

The jury is still out with respect to whether European Union (EU)-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to executive centre formation at the European level and thus to further transformation of the current political-administrative order. By measuring along several dimensions, we demonstrate that the Commission constitutes by far the most important partner of EU agencies. EU agencies deal (somewhat surprisingly) to a considerable extent with (quasi-) regulatory and politicized issues. When engaging in such areas, national ministries and the Council tend to strengthen their position, however, not to the detriment of the Commission. In addition to the Commission, national agencies make up the closest interlocutors in the daily life of EU agencies, indicating how EU-level agencies become building blocks in a multilevel Union administration, partly bypassing national ministries. We build our analysis on an on-line survey among senior officials in EU agencies.

Keywords:

• Autonomy
• centre formation
• EU agencies
• European Commission
• intergovernmental order
• transformation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors greatly acknowledge the financial support from EUROTRANS (Transformation and Sustainability of European Political Order – The Norwegian Research Council). They cordially thank Mathias Johannessen for excellent research assistance and Edoardo Chiti, Berthold Rittberger, Arndt Wonka and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. A previous version of this paper was presented at the ARENA seminar, University of Oslo, 21 September 2010, the Workshop on ‘Agency Governance in the EU and its Consequences’, University of Mannheim (MZES/RECON), 16–17 September 2010, and the ECPR Fifth Pan-European Conference, Porto, 24–26 June 2010.

Notes

A search on the Commission's website showed that seven EU agencies were, in Commissioners' job description, said to be under their authority. Some DGs present links to particular EU agencies, and some name cabinet members with a special responsibility for particular agencies.